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Hopper never painted narratives; it's up to us to impose our own stories on his images. But, says Ottinger, there are autobiographical elements in the paintings. In Hopper's 1932 painting Room in New York, a man and a woman sit together but alone. The man is engrossed in his newspaper; the woman seems lost in thought, one finger placed on the key of a piano. They're so removed from one another.

"And this is precisely the time when his wife, Josephine, was starting to write her own diary where she expressed her frustration because he was becoming a famous painter," Ottinger says.

Edward and Josephine Hopper met as young students in art school in New York and married in 1924. "And very, very fast he became one of the key figures in realism of this period, and she was left behind," Ottinger says.

At her insistence, she became his only model. That way, Jo felt that she played a part in the creation of his paintings, and Hopper encouraged this interpretation. Jo had wanted to be an actress, but that never worked out, Ottinger explains, so her husband "gave her this kind of chance to be his only actress, and every single painting is a kind of small play."